Even logging in to this was too much.

 I'm struggling and in pain.  And it doesn't really matter to me that you probably are, too.  Because, really, what good does your pain do me; likewise, what good does my pain do you?  And worse is the creeping thought that you might actually not even be in any pain--or leastwise be aware of it--and that what you'll get, Dear Reader, is a kind of warm comfort in reading this.  The kind of comfort we feel secretly when we drive past an accident on the freeway, safe and secure in our cars and our good Fortune.  

I have valiant friends.  Mostly, they try to cheer me up.  And...let me be clear...I'm a highly functional depressive.  The bills get paid.  The groceries ordered, and delivered, and put away.  The cars are washed and the gardening done and the laundry folded and the face shaved and shoes shined and the shirts pressed and the dogs fed and walked and fed and walked and fed and walked and on and on and on.  I've been in corporate America for 21 years now...as long as my entire life before then.  I know how to smile while I...shall I say...dig a fork into my hand under the table.  Love that movie.

But lately...like for the last 23 or so years...it's been a merry-go-round of avoiding dark, angry feelings.  At night, I dream mostly of zombies.  Like at least once a week.  Corpses.  The best one was recently, I dreamed that a friend cast a spell on me and delivered me into a younger, taller, more muscular body with thick wavy hair and a big fat cock.  I delighted at first in my new body, but it quickly lost its novelty, and the price of the spell...there's always a price...was that my old body...ME...was destined to follow me around until I rejoined it.  Only it would begin immediately to decay.  So through the dream--through the halls of seaside resorts and corporate board rooms--my own corpse followed me, falling increasingly into disarray.  I had the growing sense that I wanted to be reunited, but it scared me, and at one point I batted my body away with a broom.  I can feel the heaviness of his hands on me now, as those very hands type this post.  Until, at last, I was home, in my actual house (about which I never dream), answering the door, unable and unwilling to run any more, but mortally afraid.  Two of my friends whom I did not recognize were there, but not the friend that cast the spell.  And I knew profoundly that the spell was lost, and that my case was therefore hopeless.  And peeking out from behind my second friend, almost bashfully, with desiccated fingers and sunken hollow eyes and flesh peeling greenly away from a shocking white skull, was my very own zombie, dressed in rags (probably Armani), and its horrible, smiling lips pulled back from teeth as white as pearls. 

That's when I woke, of course.  No, there was no magic spell to bind us back together.  No, there was no happy ending.  I was trapped and he was trapped, and we were bound together, my Creature and me.  That's the nature of these dreams.  Zombies and catacombs.  Deep, secret, dirty places far below the bustle of civilization.  

My dreams never have happy endings.  Once in a while, I'll get a pleasant dream, but in some ways those are worse.  Like dreaming of heaven only to wake again in the mundane blankness of commutes, and awful Supreme Court nominees, and elections, and wildfires as big as nations, and endless, mindless baby-making, and kind-looking Popes dripping with false promises and polite hatred.

I dreamed once of the Vatican, where I've actually been, back before I learned that every jet flight from here to NYC cost a cubic meter of Arctic ice.  So yes, I melted about four cubic meters of ice just so I can barely remember the Vatican.  Aren't you impressed?

In that dream, I found my way into a secret chamber behind the nave of Saint Peters, and a narrow stairway that led up and up and into an ornate viewing chamber like the ones surgeons used in the early 19th century.  But instead of a surgery, this chamber overlooked, from an angle high above, a long table in a dark, palatial room, richly gilded and hung with heavy tapestries.  But there was no Pope to be seen, nor even any Cardinals.  For the monsters around that table hurt for me to consider, and I quailed in my observation post in bewilderment.  Seated around the table, deciding--as I knew--the fate of the world, were the gods of ancient Egypt.  But they hurt to look upon and made me sick to actually consider, like Old Testament seraphim, or modern tesseracts, or my own emotional state.  I woke then in terror, too, like I was struggling up out of the deep end of some black pool at night.

So this is the writing.  This is what it is.  It's not pleasant.  It's not hopeful.  It's certainly not marketable and it's not even bound to be read.  It's pointless.  It's masturbatory.  It's fruitless and it's a waste.  And that's what keeps me silent year after year.  The pointlessness.  So yes, I focus instead on material gains.  More income; that's easy to measure.  A bigger, nicer house, or at least a series of improvements that feel...well they don't feel at all, sadly.  The house gets nicer, but it never FEELS nicer.  I suspect it wouldn't matter how nice the house was, until at last I had the nicest one I could imagine and that might make me feel even shittier still.

That's the rub with trying to feel better, but skipping all this darkness.  The psyche balances.  Focus on the light, and the dark will balance your dreams.  Try to feel better, and instead I feel worse, because I know how I SHOULD feel (better) but also how I DO feel (not better).  And that makes me feel shitty, too.

So there you go, Dear Reader.  Honestly, I should probably write like this more often.  There's reasons I feel this way, of course, that I didn't write about.  They go way back, to a house full of screaming and the sounds of gunfire on an endless loop on the television, accompanied by the smells of overcooked vegetables on patterned melamine plates.  They go back to standing over a culvert, one end dammed, the other half dammed, filling with water while a terrified animal inside realizes it's going to drown.  But it wont!  There's hope!  There's daylight at one end, after all, however slim and terrifying to a nocturnal animal.  Perhaps it will escape, it thinks--I think--though how will it make it in the world in this terrible light, far from home and safety?  But the animal can't know that my father stands over the open hole, over and behind its emerging head, a double-barrelled shotgun poised and loaded and cocked.  It cannot know that a young, gay boy stands in horror just a few feet away, trying hard to be a man, and not to cry out and not to intervene when something is terribly wrong, and not to cover my ears as the shot rings out and the smell of gunpowder and blood and skunk burn acridly into my nose, as the little creature dies in a hole, he and me alone together in that hole, and the neighborhood echoes around me.      

Is it any wonder I dream?  Wouldn't you?

Is This Thing On?

Once upon a time, there was a little boy who liked Star Trek and Halloween.  The little boy lived in a house with a long hallway with lots of pictures of white people and one picture of a handsome, smiling dark stranger in a uniform.  Who is that, the little boy asked his mom.  That's your dad, she said.  And the little boy was so confused because he realized the eyes of the young man in the photo and his old father were the same, but his father never smiled at him like that.  

The little boy became a bigger boy, but not so big as kids his age, and those kids knew he was different from them.  The little boy didn't like their games, or their mean little eyes, or the stuff they talked about.  He liked art.  He liked magic.  He liked pretty things.  He liked books and ideas.  His grades were very good and came so easily to him that he barely noticed it was easy at all.  He liked the attention this earned him.  But these were not things for boys, said the other boys.  He liked the stars, and dreaming of being far away.  He liked vampires and imagined he was like them, powerful and remote and lonely.  The kids at school called him names, or ignored him.  The little boy watched them from across the playground and dreamed of being far away.

Sometime later, the little boy became a big boy.  He had ideas and wrote things.  He went to school for writing, and got his heart broken, and stopped writing.  His body wasn't that of a little boy anymore, but he wouldn't know that until many years after it happened, so focused was he on his books and his life and his fantasies.  It would come as a shock, much later, when the man he had become realized that the little boy was still there--had been there all along--inside.

The little boy started a blog.  It lasted for a couple years.  It was fun, then it wasn't.  That was like so many things in the life of the little boy, now pretending to be a man.  One grey night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more.  He abandoned the blog, and forgot about it.  He was a man now, beyond the years of boys or of boys who look like men.  He was even beyond the years of men who act like boys.  He bought a house.  He tore the house apart, dig a deep hole in the yard, and filled it with other boys who were not like the boys in the playground.

He also tore apart himself.  He dug inside.  He rummaged through old ideas and tossed many of them aside, looking for what was behind them, or underneath them.  He started asking other questions than how much, or what.  Questions like why, and how.  

He fell in love again, with the same boy who had broken his heart those years before.  All those many years.  In the intervening time, he'd built himself into a scarecrow version of a man.  Nice suits.  A fancy car.  A house of his own.  Board seats on important non-profits.  All the things a real man would have.  He was a boy covered in names that are not his own, talking about adult things with adults.  Inside, the little boy still watched from across the playground and dreamed of being far away.

All the while, deeper and deeper the digging went, until the man found that playground inside, and that little boy watching and dreaming.

And that's where I've been, Dear Reader.  And that's why I'm writing this now, because I feel stuck and afraid and alone, which is maybe the zeitgeist of our time.  The world in the five years since I've written has gotten so much scarier.  The planet careens viciously toward a man-made holocaust of unthinkable proportions.  An angry, yelling man holds sway over us all, just as an angry, yelling man held sway over the little boy's house--and the little boy's heart--all those years ago.   A decade has passed since I started this blog, and a half-decade since I've written in it.  In that much more time, our planetary fate will be sealed.  What will we do?  What will I do?  What SHOULD I do?  What is my responsibility?  Speaking of responsibility, I don't think I could stand much of what I've written just a scroll below these words.  I'm afraid to look at it, like some people are embarrassed by an old yearbook photo.  I beg your forgiveness, Dear Reader, for acting the role of an adult.

I really don't know what to say now, except to say ANYTHING.  Being vulnerable is the new radical, in a world of angry defiance and hostile self-justification and violent oppression.  So for just a few minutes now, I take that boy by the hand, and I ask him gently:  may I tell you a story of a little boy?

On Dating

A man was asked why he kept hitting himself on the head with a hammer.
"Because it feels so good when I stop," he replied.

Seriously? A Trillion Dollar Coin?

My Dear Reader,

A couple people have asked for my take on the Trillion Dollar Coin meme, so I'll do my best to give you my honest assessment.

THE WHOLE MATTER IS CRAP.

First of all, there's nothing magical about a single coin.  It could be a thousand Billion Dollar Coins (which would be easier to mint, but not easier to put in a headline or sound bite).  It's just too...too...contrived.

Second--and I really don't want to make this political--but I'm mystified by how much excitement this has gotten, when it's really quite absurd.  The left sees it as a way to get around those unreasonable "spend closer to what you actually have" Republicans, and the right sees it as Byzantine maneuvering by completely out of touch liberals.

Here's how I see it:  we have a very serious, very real problem, and this nonsense is a distraction from the tough conversations we ought to be having.  We cannot afford the promises we've made.  We can't tax enough to pay for them, and the consequences of cutting those promises (e.g. cutting "spending") are dire.

No quick fix is even responsible to consider.  This coin business is actually insulting to have to write about, and indicates just how far we've devolved when it comes to serious conversation about:

• Why we feel compelled to over-promise and underfund;
• What we're going to do about it going forward;
• Why would we rather discuss absurd fantasies than deal with the actual problems that we've created;
• What we do with $16,500,000,000,000 in already existing, real debt.  That's not a coin fantasy, that's money we actually owe.  

Sixteen and a half million, millions!  Imagine if everyone in the Greater Los Angeles area (and really think about what EVERYONE means--all those people driving or walking by outside, or sitting in their offices or houses right now) was given more than a million dollars EACH; that still wouldn't match the amount of our debt.

Most Treasury debt is actually short term (yes, we borrow mostly on our national credit card rather than taking out a mortgage), but imagine for a moment that we had to pay that $16.5T back over 30 years, like a mortgage.  That would amount to "mortgage" payments of about $73B PER MONTH, or $876B per year, assuming 3.4% interest over 30 years.  We only take in about $1.5T in cash each year from taxes, etc, so $876B is HALF of our national tax receipts.  We spend about $3T or $3.5T (hence our annual deficit; remember, "deficit" is our annual gap, but "debt" is forever).  We spend far beyond our means; like about 4x our means, if you imagine ever paying off the debt.  Even if we pay it off over 100 years, and interest rates magically stay at 3.4% that whole time (a ridiculously low rate), we'd have to spend $576B a year...and that's to pay it off in 2113.  Still a huge portion of what should be our budget.

And from whom do we borrow all this money?  Between $1.5T and $2T a year?  Well, conveniently, the Fed is buying about $1.2T in debt from the Treasury this year for its Quantitative Easing program.  So borrow it from ourselves, minted out of thin air.  Yes, that's as bad as it sounds, and don't let anyone talk to you about the "velocity of money" as evidence that it's GOOD for us all.  It's actually had little or no effect, as you've seen and felt from the Quantitative Easing we've "enjoyed" over the last several years.  It's mostly a clever way to debt finance our annual deficit.  The rest comes from all the dollars we spend overseas (buying disposable goods that don't increase our national wealth), and the new owners of those dollars (like China) have to put them somewhere, so they buy our debt.

These are the conversations that we should be having.  Not some idiocy about a miracle coin that's going to save us.  If anything, all that should show you my Dear Reader is that we've gotten to the point where money is meaningless, and is backed by wishes and fantasy.  That should concern you greatly, because the effects of such a monetary regime can be disastrous.

If the coin subject comes up, ask people if they know about the numbers a couple paragraphs up, and how much of our national budget would go to debt service if we were serious about paying off our debt.  And don't be tempted to imagine that Uncle Sam can solve its problems as easily as printing a platinum coin.  This coin thing is a psychological phenomenon, not an economic phenomenon, and it's dissociative  irresponsible, childish, and counterproductive to the work we actually have ahead of us.

On Microblogging

It turns out unemployment has its advantages. I get to walk more, think more, and sneak in little snippets of life.

On Cliffs: Fiscal and Otherwise

It's hard to break old patterns.  Sometimes, we set up artificial goals in order to "motivate" ourselves to break the patterns in which we're stuck.  At one point or another, each of considers creating an artificial "cliff" to scare ourselves into change.  I'm speaking, of course, about my own personal patterns.  Specifically, of not writing and of finding almost anything else to do--solitaire, non-profit work, for-profit work, dinners, errands, whatever.

I'm also speaking, of course, about this ridiculous "fiscal cliff" we've all tumbled over today.  Funny how inner journeys are repeated in the outside world.  In the case of our elected representatives, their old patterns of spending and taxing (and never relating the two to each other--heavens no!) have resulted in an addiction to an unsustainable pattern of behavior--denial and procrastination.  So they set up an artificial goal for themselves, much like many of us do this time of year to "motivate" our new behaviors.

But here's the problem, as I see it:  surface level goals don't address the underlying causes of the problems.  Writing each day, or even several times a week (see how quickly these goals get mitigated?), doesn't address the reason I DON'T write--any more than creating an artificial fiscal cliff, entirely manufactured by congress and entirely arbitrary in it's timing and scale, will address the underlying problems in the current composition of our government.

Thus, Dear Reader, we are placed in the position of compromise.  And it strikes me as appropriate that compromise comes up this time of year.  Resolutions are promises we make to ourselves, and compromise has that damn "promise" built into the word.  Funny, it strikes me as a "co-promise", doesn't it?

And maybe that's what's missing here.  A little bit of co-promise.  Each of our intractable halves of government (don't be fooled, there are more flavors in the cookie jar than two, but two is all were given until we demand more options) needs to come together.  Both are being unreasonable.  You can't keep spending the way we do, even if we tax the bejeezus out of everyone.  And we can't protect everyone from being taxed at all--even if we cut current spending to zero we'd still have $17,000,000,000,000 in debt to pay off, and that means SOMEBODY has to pay SOMETHING.  So there's the rub:  both sides are wrong on sticking to their positions.  Both sides need to make some promises to themselves, and to the other side.

And like your resolutions, Dear Reader, our esteemed legislators know what they need to do to get healthy and meet their obligations.  They just don't want to.  Because, you see, you and I have let them set their own deadlines--let them set their own "cliff", if you will.  Perhaps it's time we set a cliff of a different sort for our elected representatives--FIX THIS PROBLEM OR BE VOTED OUT OF OFFICE.  THAT'S the cliff we should be talking about, not some arbitrary series of cuts and tax increases that were not made in good faith.  This fiscal cliff is the opposite of compromise--it's mutually assured destruction.  Neither side believed the other would actually go through with it (PS neither did Wall Street, that weird combo of bookie and blood-thirsty audience for this WWF... our Washington Wrestling Farce).

We cannot elect intractable people to offset the other guy's intractable people and expect governance of any sort other than what we've gotten.  And it's you and me who put these fools where they are, with each side ratcheting up its rhetoric with each new extreme nut-job elected to the House.  It's time for mutual disarmament, I say, and not the nuclear sort--this would be a disarmament of our elected buffoons.  Imagine what it would be like if we had reasonable people with reasonable positions who compromised (there's that co-promise again) in ways that built our nation rather than set it against itself.

Naive, Dear Reader?  No more than any resolution is; no more than any effort to change an established pattern, or to make the world as we've had it more like the world as we'd like it.  And all of us know the principles of this grand bargain--we've all got to chip in, and we can't all have everything we want.  That's a microcosm of life, and as each of us sets out to make our resolutions manifest in this lucky '13, I think we'll be more likely to achieve our goals--our resolutions--if we begin to work on our own psychologies with as much fervor and verve as we use on criticizing each others'.

The Things We Leave Behind

Dear Reader,

I'm not much for New Year's Resolutions.  To quote Dangerous Liaisons, they're "humiliating if you fail, and commonplace if you succeed."  Better, I think, to make resolutions--and thereby to engage in self-work and self-improvement--all year long.

But this year feels especially weighty in its exit.  2012, as evidenced by the amount I've written, has been an especially rough year.  In many ways, it's been a year of endings:  relationships, jobs, over-identifications, illusions, wishes.  There's a part of me that is entranced by those endings.  I want to fetishize them.  That's something we all do--just look at the (disappointing) drama around the Mayan calendar.  We're obsessed with endings, and we insist that they be literalized in the outside world.  I'm not immune to that, and in some ways it's easier to focus on the ending (as an abdication of responsibility), than to consider the profound power and implication of a beginning (unlike endings, we're responsible for beginnings and for all the future paths they embody).  And I recognize that each of this year's endings allows for beginnings of a different kind.

But here, Dear Reader, your valiant writer is going to intervene!!  I'm going to take a stake, and make a stand.  I will propose for us a distinction between an 'ending' and a 'leaving behind.'  In one, I have agency, choice, and power.  In the other, it happens TO me.  So as I've reflected on it these last few days, I've come to think of 2012 as a year not of endings, but of leaving things behind.

And that, Dear Reader, is where you come in.  For one of the things I'm going to leave behind is my silence. This new year will be about writing.  So you'll see more of me here, and more of me in other projects as well.

That's right:  the choice I made for my career and my life has given me more time to write and to focus--at least for a while--on what it might feel like to actually chase my dreams a bit.  What, you say?  Haven't you been doing that, you Crow?  You've been having a wild good time chasing a big career around and splashing around in the bird-bath of its rewards.  "Are you not entertained?  Is this not what you came to see?"  (Points if you get the reference.)

No.  And healing from the experience of the last few years will, I think, involve going INSIDE instead of acting things out in the outside world.  And that means more writing.  More thinking.  More breathing.  Leaving behind the chase in order to work on the soul for a bit.

Speaking of the chase, let's talk romance for a bit, shall we?  I wonder, Dear Reader, if you'd tell me about what it means to love?  I'll tell you what it's been for me over the years.  Love has been obligation, responsibility, imbalance, dependence, power differentials, resentment, and sorrow.  The best love has been that of my friends, and I've chased it in romance unsuccessfully for years--in fact, almost two decades since I came out of the closet, and dreamed what it would be like to find a man to love, who would love me in return.  Dear Reader, I AM LEAVING THIS BEHIND.  I know that's a bit of inflation--that my ego is getting a little too big for its britches when I make a statement like that--but I feel it's important to take a stand, lest this damaged version of love set the stage for the future.  NO! Says the Crow!

Love will be about relating authentically with myself, and taking responsibility for my feelings, defenses, violence, and anger.  That will be the foundation for relating to someone else.  Love will be the act of valiantly and bravely standing up for myself, and stoking the flame of my own gay identity and self--of that Promethean flame that's burned in me for nearly 20 years.  Yes, 2013 will mark 20 years out of the closet!  And I owe it to that young boy, that daring and wonderful little boy who looked inside and saw something different in himself than in anyone around him; I owe it to him to embrace the possibility that he (that I!) deserve love, and deserve to be treated with respect, and with dignity, and with joy, and with bravery equal to the challenges ahead.  And if I cannot find this in the outer world, then Dear Reader, I WILL EMBRACE IT IN MY INNER WORLD.  And that will be no compromise, no meager substitute--for I am coming to realize that my love is my own, and it is my experience.  It lives not in some other man, but in me.  I love.  I do not ask permission from someone else to love.  My love is my own, so I am leaving behind the belief that I need to find it, and embracing the belief that I already embody it--damn my defenses.

I'm using a lot of caps this time, and you'll note that's a different tone than I've had in the past.  To this I say, DEAR READER, YOU AINT SEEN NOTHING YET.  As I've worked to become more related to myself, and more connected to my feelings, I am choosing to leave behind the politeness, and to embrace the REALNESS.  This is my fucking, messy, angry, light-filled and shadow-laden, joyful, unedited story.  This is the feeling I'm going to work to bring into my life, my writing, my love, my inner work, my career.

I am leaving behind the over-identification I've had with my external accomplishments--my high-profile job (from which I've derived a considerable amount of borrowed unjust power--and have secretly REVELED in that); my community engagement (which--like a hot boyfriend--has such overt and tempting and toxic social power); my beautiful possessions (which, I am coming to see, have owned me more than I, them).  These things I wish to leave behind.

O Reader, now that I've been so inflated, the shame comes up and tells me that I'm being silly.  "You'll never be able to do this, Crow.  You'll fail.  You don't deserve love.  You'd better just focus on making money and buying things that make people envy you.  That's the real love.  You're a failure.  Look at your life:  single, unemployed, bereft, unattached, powerless, worthless.  Get a big job quick so you can buy yourself something to prove your value."

To that demon I say, "Fuck you, and the shade you rode in on.  I leave you behind as well."  My defenses will come up, and I'll no doubt act out (consciously and unconsciously) in ways that I cannot now predict, but that are sure to be violent, anti-self, aggressive, and shadowy.  But I'll face them--and their consequences--in due time.

The intensity of this year has created many occasions to face demons of this sort, where I've acted violently against my own interests and had to deal with the consequences.  And--here's the magic part--it turns out I'm quite capable of facing the challenges these situations present.  And more  than this, Dear Reader, more than this!!!  It turns out your Sagittarian Crow actually LIKES IT!  Isn't that crazy!?  I love this adventure, and this exploration of my own subjectivity--even my own shadow.  I hesitate, and I attack, and I resist, but at my core, your Sable--like some warrior in a fantasy legend--likes the journey.  That's a core ethic of mine--to explore and to improve and to be brave.  In this way, I will invoke gay spirit and the very energy I tapped into when I came out of the closet--that's the energy I'm invoking here, of irrepressible spirit and a sense of self and the belief in truth--my truth--however hard it is.  For if it is hard-won, then all the better to win it.

And that, Dear Reader, is the story of 2012.  It has been a hard-won year.  Your Crow is tired, and his feathers are ruffled, and there have been storms.  But he's undaunted, and is flying away from those things that, in his heart, he's needed to leave behind.  And he's flying toward the dawn.  The solstice is passed, and the days grow longer, and 2013 will be a profoundly good year.

And here's a song about resisting the things we want--of struggling for the breath of life while, at the same time, hearing the voices of our defenses.  What happens in a life where we leave that behind?  What wonders would that life have?  Let's find out, shall we?  ;-)